After several weeks of deep contemplation, I decided to go against my best wishes and decided to have non-human-but-still-humanoid sentient races in my conworld. Like the humans, they are basically the races that survived from the last world. However, most, if not all of them, will basically die out for various reasons within a thousand or two years of recorded history, meaning that later people in my conworld will think the ancient records of these non-human races are simply mythology and religious/propaganda nonsense... that is, until some archaeologists stumble on some curious skeletons that turn out not to be hoaxes.

So far I probably won't be doing anything too drastic or really that imaginative with these sentient races, we got Mongolian elves, Southeast Asian Vietnamese-guerilla-warfare Dwarves, various types of Wolf/Dog-people, at least two types of Cat people, maybe an insectoid race (either that or rat people), and my favorite, Akkadian-speaking Minoan pirate Dolphins with an Indian caste system. I'm probably forgetting something.

My main ones atm are the Kiuri, quick description over here. Humanoids with a couple, mostly aesthetic differences.

Then there are the Ipkansi, amphibious dwarves who haven't discovered fire; their conlang is gonna be morphologically and semantically as simple as I can make it, but is also gonna be a bit of a playground for pragmatics and unusual consonants like clicks, implosives and trills; they're incapable of speaking Kiuri langs and vice versa, and since the Ipkansi mainly live in swamps and lakes there's very little interaction (Kiuri can't swim and are afraid of water).

The Namaki are 12 foot giants that more resemble bears than humans, with a similar level of intelligence. They're even less common, since they originate from a different 'universe' and only a small population has managed to survive in this one.

And there are the Tasoini; similar to the Kiuri, but only 4 ft tall, no crests or horns, completely herbivorous and with orange fur. These guys only live for about 20 years, and they have limited creativity and imagination; it's in their nature to scavenge and copy ideas off others. It's possibly because of this (and their smaller population) that their own languages are dying out and Kiuri languages are taking over. Plenty of Tasoini/Kiuri biracial societies exist, and while there is some racism, it's not dominant or extreme, especially since the two races have coexisted for millenia.

They live on a moon, Ezekial, orbiting a gas giant, Job, in a system of 5 worlds, categorized YN002GB. The system itself is binary, consisting of a g-type, Siren, and k-type, Lucifer, star. I know how unlikely it is, but their biochemistry is based on DNA, just like ours, and as such are carbon-based lifeforms. They're primarily insectivores - as most predators are on Ezekial. The moon itself is small, providing a low gravity environment, but oxygen is still apparent in huge quantities in the atmosphere, making giant insect-like fauna commonplace.

I'm working on a language for them, but I'm doing too many things at once, so everything is taking forever.

I have a number of conpeople, and only one of them is human. But they're a projection of future Earth society, so why not? My other conpeople tend to be related in some way to Earth's animals. I have the Hra'vakh, my principle conrace, patterned after samanders; the avian Xarisans; the Kuti, patterned after bush babies; the Rohan, patterned after horses; the Chellor, sentient, humanoid plantforms; a cetacean species or two...yeah. They're all from different planets in the Milky Way.

I have three languages, though two of them are sketches. I designed the hra'vakh to be alien enough to be foreign, but familiar enough to be relatable. That's why Hra'anh started as an English relex. Once I learned more about linguistics, I decided to change things up. I made it primarily erg-abs, added a bunch of cases, and now it makes a lot more sense. The other two are nothing but sketches. The xarisan language is tonal, agglutinative like hra'anh, and tripartite in alignment. It also has engma and /g/, two phonemes that I keep wanting to use in hra'anh, but can't . The kuti language is a simple nom-acc with a small phoneme inventory. It's currently a sketch like the xarisan language, but it's not going to be very feature-rich.

My primary, and only well-thought-out, conpeople are the somewhat humanoid, avian inhabitants of a number of massive starships. Since their planet was destroyed a few thousand generations back, they've taken migration to a whole new level. They are the ones who speak my first true conlang, Evelēranēl, which I organized to have a grammar similar enough to English that it does not require too much brain effort for an English-speaker to learn, but different enough that it is distinctly alien.

C Cou Proıdounıœmæ Lègælıefra technically has a 'conworld' and, by extension 'conpeople' to go with it, but I wasn't the one who thought them out and I have absolutely no legal control over them. They're humanoid (well... technically humans are gallifreyanoid), but since the language is a fan work and I own absolutely nothing related to the show on which it is based, I can't really play with the conworld and conpeople as much as I would like to.

My main (currently really only, but I have a few very basic ideas for 3 other con-cultures) con people are lizard folk, called the Salthans. Their actually loosely based on the lizard-folk from Ultima Underworld, and some words were borrowed from it for their language.

Cordoma wrote:The most fun I ever had with a conculture was my race of sticks. Yes, that's right: sticks. I shit you not.

I want to know more about this.

+2

Race of sticks? Sounds a little like the "sapling army" that appears towards the end of
the Russian folktale Fool of the World and the Flying Ship.

Kewl idea, no matter the folk who tells it!

BTW, my conraces include Sasquatches, sentient marmoset\Homo florisensis people, and goblin~like folk who possibly descended/were fused from one or all of the following: baboons, cynognathus, world's ugliest dog, Uncle Deadly from the Muppets.

However, the protagonist's race is human. I have vacillated between human/elven/Homo florisensis/eloi. Yeah, I know, pretty milquetoast/oatmeal/vanilla. No blue skins, though. They're people who have survived a long while into Earth's future, or an Earthlike colony in the future. Most of these folks, and all sentients for that matter, are ignorant of the technology present. To them its essentially magic, and frankly, if we were catapulted about 300 million years into humanity's future (presuming humanity still exists and continues "progressing") technology would appear as magic to us. An idea that I have toyed with, and will probably use, is some theory of how Earth Scientists created small moon-sized space colonies that are "reverse yo-yoed" (sorry for the lack of lacklustre syfy terminology here) through wormholes. They do this so that on the colony in question, 300 or so odd millions of years pass, while virtually no time has passed on Earth. The purpose was originally to fabricate some kind of drug/elixir, or to come up with the answer for everything. It may just become a crazy amusement ride for an extremely bored futuristic human super-race. ?

There are also a Preakness of sentient Ligers, Walpertingers, Giant Spee-eyeders (Arachnis deathicus! No, really they're called Malmignotta), and a very big and malicious Squonk with a chip on his melting shoulder. No unicorns or MLP (sorry, had to draw the line somewhere). But rabbits play an important, non-speaking role (Huzzah, Thaen!).

Deities include The Goddess of the Moon and Rains, a trio of Werewolf Storm-Gods, a kind of Wereboar god of War (who also manifests himself as a bratty little child), his servant an unctuous shapeshifting Manbat-thing who likes to meddle, the three "Gods of the Shore", who take the form of a sort of Japanese Zen master, a giant dragon-turtle, and a kind of Merman.

There should be a sort of elk-headed God of the Hunt, kind of like Cernunnos and that Cro-Magnon painting of the half-deer half-person hybrid. He seemed like a cool idea, he just did not seem to pleach himself into the story...yet.

I have set aside my main project as it's level of detail is killing any chance of a book ever arising. So, I've began simply writing one based on small ideas. I'm concerned greatly about consistency but we'll see how it goes.
The races are... humans.
Subsets of humans include demons, fay, angels, wraiths, and poltergeists.
The souls of deceased humans that for some reason retain their sense of self (rather than returning to the 'soul-stuff' from which they came) are referred to as angels.
Wraiths are angels who have the strength and desire to forge an ethereal 'substance' with limited ability to affect the material world.
Poltergeists are wraiths that have bound themselves to an object, making the object into an anchor that holds them to the material world. This allows them to utilise more of their strength in manipulating that world, though it does risk being banished again should its anchor be destroyed.
Demons are wraiths that have made an anchor of a dead body, not necessarily their own. They can shape and animate this body to a large degree and then use it to manipulate their surroundings. These corpses tend to disintegrate quickly (a number of years) however and the demon often ends up looking for a new host fairly soon.
Fays are living humans with a parasitical wraith sharing their body. The wraith has limited control over the human and must exert considerable willpower to force its host to do anything. When the human eventually dies (from old age, violence etc.) the fay absorbs the human soul and gains its strength. The ultimate goal of a fay is to garner enough power to absorb a living soul and gain full control of a fresh body.
All angels can be destroyed by a number of means, so no fay has, yet, achieved its goal.

My primary conworld is a fantasy setting, with multiple races. However, I tried to avoid the traditional setup of men, dwarves, and elves, not because I dislike it or find it cliche, but because I wanted to do something a little different.

So, there is only one species, humans, but humans are divided into a multitude of different races, who anatomically and physiologically are quite different from each other and from actual Homo Sapiens. Despite this, all the different races (called tribes) readily interbreed, and their children are perfectly fertile. In fact, most people have at least a little mixed ancestry.

That being said, these humans have some crazy features. Some have bioluminescence, or feathers, or scales, or gills. Some live for more than 200 years, some live less than 50. Some mate once a year, some take twice as long to reach maturity. They live in environments ranging from scorching deserts to airless mountains, brackish swamps to volcanic wastelands, or even deep underground.

I don't have a single main race, but the vast majority of the story takes place in a kingdom about half the size of the united states, which is the home of thirteen tribes. The group of main characters draws from several of these.

So, I don't really know what my answer to the original question should be.

My conworld is a several dimension world in which each dimension features a different race. One has humans. Others have humanoids. My main focus has always been the reiiT of nendeiirasuu, the grim reapers of our world.